BACON PORTRAIT UNSEEN FOR FORTY YEARS TO BE SOLD AT AUCTION
It is a painting that has not been seen in public since 1963, and it may disappear again after it is sold next month for what is anticipated to be a world-record price for the artist, writes Louise Jury for The Independent. Study for a Portrait II, 1956, one of the most famous in the series of popes by the British artist Francis Bacon, is expected to bring in approximately £12 million ($23 million) when it goes on sale at Christie’s in London. The work is one of the few of the acclaimed series—inspired by Diego Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X_, 1650—not already in a museum or gallery. Although the artist painted more than fifty papal portraits, he destroyed several of them. The study is presumed to be the second of two paintings of popes that Bacon completed in the autumn of 1956. The first is in the National Gallery of Canada.
